Five teams go into the final week at 8-7. If two of them win, those are your wild cards. If three or more of them win, you have to use tiebreakers. The Jets win all tiebreakers at 9-7, followed by the Ravens. That’s why those are the two teams that control their own destiny.

Tiebreakers involving Denver, Houston, and Pittsburgh at 9-7 are the only mildly complicated scenario. Denver beats Houston, Houston beats Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh beats Denver. If all of them finish 9-7, Denver wins the three-way tiebreaker. That’s why the outcome of a Denver-Pittsburgh tiebreaker depends on whether Houston wins.

If only one team finishes 9-7, or if none do, then there’s room for other teams. First pick the 8-7-1 team if there is one. In the crazy event that there are multiple 8-7-1 teams, use the same tiebreakers as at 9-7.

Finally, there may be room for one or two 8-8 teams in the playoffs. At 8-8, Jacksonville wins all tiebreakers, followed by Denver, followed by Miami. No other team can win a meaningful tiebreaker at 8-8. That’s why Denver is the only current 8-7 team that can lose and still make the playoffs.

See it here.

Now this was an era when the pitching was generally great and I was seeing a lot of baseball games. I saw Tim Belcher throw a one-hitter and face 27 batters. I saw Zane Smith give up a leadoff single and no more hits the rest of the game. Doug Drabek took no-hitters into the ninth inning twice in his career, and I was there both times.

But there was never anything quite like Scott Sanderson’s performance in what came to be known as the “day-night single-header.” It was a typical 1:35 Sunday afternoon start in Pittsburgh. Some of my friends were heading out of town that night and I told them I’d meet up with them if the game got out in time. It didn’t.

The Pirates scored three runs in the first off Jeff Pico, who then settled down and pitched effectively for six more innings. Meanwhile, the Cubs chipped away a run at a time, finally taking a 4-3 lead in the top of the ninth.

The Cubs’ bullpen blew this lead, in a weird confluence of World Series goats past and future. The tying run reached base on a leadoff walk by Calvin Schiraldi, and scored on a sacrifice fly allowed by Mitch Williams. But that wasn’t all. After the fourth walk of the inning reloaded the bases with two out, Williams went to a 3-0 count on Andy Van Slyke. He recovered to reach 3-2. Then with all the runners in motion, Van Slyke hit a bouncer to Ryne Sandberg at second. Sandberg bobbled the ball … Jeff King crossed the plate with the winning run … Sandberg recovered … threw to first in time to force Van Slyke … and the winning run didn’t count. We went to extra innings.

The tie score was meteorologically unfortunate, as in the bottom of the 10th, with one out and the winning run on third, and a 1-1 count on King, a sudden rainstorm deluged the field. Thus ended the daytime half of the day-night single-header.

The nightcap commenced at 5:43 with a grounder to short. The runner on third, R.J. Reynolds, took a chance on breaking for home but was thrown out easily. Jay Bell then struck out looking and the game continued.

Another striking feature of this era was that once Cubs manager Don Zimmer had used five relievers, the well was dry. The 13-man pitching staff was still a thing of the future (the dystopian future). The pitcher who set up that 10th-inning jam, then wriggled out of it after fretting in the clubhouse for 45 minutes, was Scott Sanderson. And before long it became clear that he was the last man standing. Every inning, the Cubs didn’t score, and every inning, Sanderson trotted back out to complete his shutout.

The Cubs never threatened until the top of the 16th, when they had runners on first and third with one out and Shawon Dunston hit a fly ball to right. Only a great play on both ends by Scott Little, playing his third major league game, and catcher Junior Ortiz kept the run from scoring. Meanwhile, thanks to Sanderson’s strong pitching, the Pirates never threatened either. They had two on with one out in the bottom of the 17th, until a fly to right caught Scott Little napping and he was doubled off first, helping explain why his third game was also his last.

All in all, Scott Sanderson pitched eight shutout innings, from the 10th to the 17th, under circumstances where he could not be relieved and any one run would’ve meant losing the game. Finally, at 8:03 p.m., leading off the 18th inning, Jeff King hit a 3-1 pitch into the left field seats. But I never held that against Sanderson.

By instructive contrast, Jim Leyland kept his relievers fresh. Each one of his five relievers gave him at least an inning and a third; Randy Kramer gave him three. And the winning pitcher, in his only relief appearance of the year and his last until 1998, was Doug Drabek.

The art of keeping a scorecard at a baseball game is dying if not dead. People often ask me why I keep score. I’ve learned to answer: “To keep my head in the game.” That’s the truest and best answer; once, I tried not keeping score, and I looked up startled to discover it was the sixth inning already.

The second best reason to keep score is to preserve the memories. I can look at this scorecard and recall this game from 20 years ago. In order to write this article, I didn’t have to look up any outside information except Doug Drabek’s statistics and Scott Little’s first name. No, I don’t remember the Scott Sanderson game as if it were yesterday. But with my scorecard, I almost can.

Whatever the warning looks like (something like this, apparently), this news answers one of my long-standing questions: Isn’t it a problem that people take “sinus” medicines and “cold” medicines and “so you can rest” medicines, that all contain pretty much the same five ingredients, without realizing that they might be overdosing on those five ingredients?

After all, I live in a country where I couldn’t buy Dimetapp for my 1-year-old because my government thinks I’m too stupid to tell ounces from milliliters. (Or more cynically, my government takes orders from drug companies that are afraid I’ll blame them for my stupidity and sue them.) Last time I left the country, I wanted to buy some infant cold medicine just to prove I could handle the responsiblity, but my wife vetoed the idea. She understandably didn’t want to spend our anniversary in the Bahamas hunting through drug stores to make a political point.

Like most people, I had no idea acetaminophen was at all dangerous. It’s Advil, not Tylenol, that carries the comical warning that you should start with one pill and only if that doesn’t work, proceed to take a second pill. By comparison, Tylenol seems harmless.

The FDA is a political organization that takes its scientific input from advisory committees. In this case, the committee offered confused, inconsistent recommendations: When acetaminophen is combined with other over-the-counter medicines, the product should remain available, but with a “black box” warning. But when it’s combined with prescription medicines, the committee wants the product pulled off the market altogether.

This is backwards. Under the care of a physician and a pharmacist, a patient’s intake of prescribed acetaminophen can be monitored. Relying on the patient’s own ability to read and comprehend over-the-counter drug labels, though, is how we get thousands of acetaminophen overdoses every year.

Luckily, the committee had an idea. Quoting from the ABC story:

It also voted that to lower single adult dose [sic] to 650 mg. While there is a 650 mg extended-release acetaminophen tablet, the most common is the 325 mg pill, so patient [sic] would be instructed to take no more than two at a time.

The committee voted 24 to 13 to recommend making the 500 mg pill available by prescription only. So, in order to get former maximum dose [sic] of 1,000 mg of acetaminophen at one time, a patient would need a prescription.

Or, you know, a patient could take three pills, like everyone does already.

This brings up another long-standing question of mine, which this news does not answer. What’s the point, when a medicine is available over the counter, of distributing a slightly larger pill and calling it prescription only? Is it just so the manufacturer can charge some insurance company $40 for $4 worth of drugs? I guess I answered my own question. And pass that added cost on to all of us in annual 10% increases in health insurance premiums? That too.

Not surprisingly, McNeil is worried about losing market share, and is pretending to be worried about patient safety. As if aspirin and Advil are recklessly dangerous as substitute painkillers.

The dosage restrictions prompted dismay from McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the makers of Tylenol.

“McNeil Consumer Healthcare strongly disagrees with the committee’s recommendation,” the company said in a statement. “McNeil Consumer Healthcare believes that this recommendation is likely to lead to more serious adverse events as consumers shift to other over-the-counter products such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) in search of pain relief.”

In other words: “Hey, make sure you pick on Advil next.” And the next time Advil causes 42,000 emergency room visits in a year, I’m sure the FDA will.

Rather than writing a full analysis, I wanted to make the PDF of the decision publicly available as soon as possible. Donations to defray the $1.76 charge to my PACER account would be appreciated, if I had a PayPal link or something. You can just think kind thoughts about me instead.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, you can skip reading the thousand words of this article and just look at the pictures of empty premium seats adjacent to full non-premium seats.  Looks like the market for $2,625 baseball tickets is not all the Yankees expected it to be.

Also, note the journalistic trick of photographing the least desirable section of premium seats, the ones farthest down the line past the visitors’ dugout.  Show the premium section directly behind home plate and you don’t have much of a story anymore.